The Killer's Reverie (redone)
by PHLover213
Summary: Massive overhaul and rewrite. Erik Specteur is a loon, Raoul de Chagny is horribly charming, and Christine Daae is a tempest of indecision and female sensuality. What a great combination! Warning: blood, death, eventual drug use. E/C and R/C. Modern AU. Hopefully less melodramatic and pretentious writing.


**Golly gee, it has been a while! Sort of felt it was time to revisit and overhaul this story—very short first chapter and not much action, but let's see what we can do, eh?**

**xxxx**

_For the killer, there had always been some inexplicable delight in knowing. Understanding. Being aware of that which others were not. Example number one, the way Christine Daaé looked when she was sleeping. Not even her simpering little know-it-all knew that. Nor would he ever, had the killer anything to do with it. She was so peaceful at rest—her thin, delicate hands grasped her pillows and her lips were parted with soft, even breath. The poor girl was evidently incapable of closing her curtains and as such there was a shifting shaft of moonlight that teased her face, glinting over her eyelashes and unruly hair as she slept, every night. And he knew, every night, because he watched every night. In the more temperate spring and summer it was easy, but earlier in the year when rain fell in freezing sheets over the city, he had to be very careful climbing in her window._

_He had not always watched her. It had started a few months ago when, worried, initially, for her safety on a night when she had fallen ill, he had snuck into her rather measly apartment to be certain there was nothing wrong. And the killer had been entranced by that same damned shaft of moonlight that now passed over her lips, now her nose, now her lidded eyes. They were blue, stunning, gorgeous blue, and though they had never been trained on him he had spent enough nights up, alone, sketching through a haze of morphine and depression, to know that her eyes were glorious, innocently sultry pools of blue, rimmed by gorgeous lashes._

_Dear God, she was beautiful._

_But her beauty was tainted daily by the student. The slack-jawed, drooling buffoon that dared to imagine himself a suitor to a woman who deserved to be a queen. He was rather a pretty prince, but the killer would wager damn near anything that his impotence was matched only by his stupidity. Granted, of course, months previously, in the killer's own classroom the boy had excelled. A passion not for the law, for the vengeance upon those who do wrong, but for order, and unbending rules, had caused his excellence. But now he was nothing but a gnat, an annoyance that simply would not go away and had the sort of irrepressibly likable demeanour that so drove the killer mad and Christine Daaé to insipid oaths of adoration._

_She was beautiful but that girl could be absolutely moronic sometimes._

_It seemed to the killer that she had to be retrained in her manners of thought._

_Example number two on the list of things that the killer found a perverse pleasure in was the colour that faces went when one was being strangled. A sort of gaudy purple-grey colour that made the eyeballs stand out in an almost comical fashion. Raoul de Chagny would look quite fetching in that shade._

_The killer stood and made for the window. Christine still slept peacefully, blissfully unaware of him, of all he was—thank whatever force there was drifting through the vacuum of the universe—and would remain that way. What was he to her but a minor character in a life so full of colour and vibrancy? He doubted she knew his name. _

_Shoving his hands in his pockets, he kicked at a plant in the front yard of her building. Damn her. He didn't ask for any of this._

**xxxx**

_Numbers clicked through his head every time he killed. This particular young lady had the honour of being the twentieth to die at his hands by strangulation with piano wire. She was currently drowning in her own blood. It was a bit pointless and dramatic, really, to kill someone so inelegantly, but that was part of the appeal on this night—not just stress relief, but visual expression of... of what? Anger? Frustration? The killer sighed, tossing the body to the ground. He could dispose of it, but the stench was really not worth the trouble, and besides, he needed to give his students stimuli on occasion. They could be so terribly boring without a good murder to talk about. A cat among the pigeons, as it were. A bloody, scantily clad, gasping cat. _

_He inspected her as she lay choking, batting rather feebly at his mask, causing it to fall from his face. Prostitute, from the looks of things, and probably one with children. That was... one hundred and thirty two, give or take, orphans he had created in fifteen years. God, he should be rewarded by psychiatrists everywhere for keeping them in a job. It was altruistic of him, really. He reached down and touched the wound from which blood was seeping, though the pulse was soon to stop. He had caused lacerations to the jugular—impressive, really. Christine should be congratulated—she had apparently so agitated him that he had gotten into a vein. Deep. _

_Straightening his coat, he coiled the bloody wire and placed it in his pocket. He could be a little... unceremonious in his murders at times, but he certainly wasn't an idiot._

_Dawn was breaking over the city and he smirked into the sun as he walked down the street._

**xxxx**

**See my profile for commentary as it happens? I'm really hoping that my review begs aren't quite so desperate this time. Hint hint.**


End file.
